What's New for Devs in iOS 12 and Xcode 10?

Amidst all the fanfare of another WWDC, Apple introduced us to iOS 12. This is one of the most focused releases for both consumers and developers, emphasizing performance optimization. As well as this focus on performance and optimization, iOS also brings some feature iterations on many of the libraries we know and love. This includes the evolution of emojis (with memojis), Siri shortcuts, augmented reality and machine learning.

For developers, Apple has focused on providing its community with a plethora of new tools and SDKs to help power the next generation of iOS apps. Developers also get a lot of improvements to Xcode and Apple’s newest frameworks—ARKit, CoreML and SiriKit—have received significant feature upgrades.

Machine Learning has evolved rapidly since first introduced in 2017, with CoreML 2 making it easy for mainstream developers to design, train and test models. ARKit 2, Apple’s second iteration of its augmented reality library is another library has improved distinctly this year, thanks to three prominent new features: shared experiences enabling multiplayer AR experiences, persistent experiences which allows for the saving and restoring of states, and 3D object detection in addition to 2D moving image tracking. Apple has also improved notifications by adding the ability the group and prioritize notifications contextually and created the new Password Auto-fill framework for integrating third-party password management apps.

Siri Shortcuts is Apple’s addition to SiriKit, allowing third-party developers the ability to integrate custom intelligent shortcuts in spotlight search and lock-screen, as well as to use their voice to summon and perform that custom action. Xcode 10 also introduces a whole new range of improvements, from dark mode to multi-cursor editing and new source control visuals in the source code editor, to an entirely new build system. Xcode 10 also supports parallel testing reducing the time to complete tests drastically.

Objectives of this article

In this article, you will learn all about the new changes that are coming to iOS 12 for developers, and we will be covering the following: